Like most of the Midwest, we awoke this morning to a winter wonderland, having received a foot of snow overnight that had drifted even higher in many places. And to pretty much every single area school being closed, giving the kids all our first snow day of the school year.

Ron set out fairly early on to get the driveway cleared. First by shovel…

but then, thanks to a very generous neighbor, he was able to use a snow blower to clear most of the rest of it. Even with the snow blower, it was a slow, difficult process that took him quite a while.

While Daddy was shoveling and snow blowing in the front, the girls embarked on a treasure hunt of sorts in the back. You see, they’d left all of their sleds out sitting on the hill after the last time they were out there sledding – so now the sleds were completely buried. It took a while for the girls to find and dig them all out.

But even after they’d found the sleds – there was just simply too much snow on the hill to actually do any sledding. Which was ok – the girls found plenty of other ways to play in the white stuff, including rolling down the hill, making snow angels, and having a snowball fight with the neighbor kids and their mom while she attempted to work on their driveway.

After a while, everyone trooped inside, cold and wet – and asking for hot chocolate. While I worked on filling cups and heating water, the kids ran downstairs to play in the basement. Which they’ve done many, many times before with never a major issue.

When I first heard the thump, I wondered if someone had fallen down the stairs. But by the time I got to there, I could hear Becca screaming from down below in the other room. Something sounded very wrong.

And it was…

We were so glad that Ron had already gotten the driveway cleared! And that the plows had already made a pass through our neighborhood. The street in front of our house hadn’t been plowed yet, but enough cars had gone down to make a track and it was only a short distance to the cross street that the plows had gotten to. Thankfully the major streets were in fairly decent shape as Ron, Becca and I headed off to Urgent Care, leaving the big girls at our neighbor’s house.

It took a while to get out of her what had actually happened – at first we thought she’d hit her head on a corner of the ceramic tiles on the basement floor (which I’ve hated ever since we moved into this house, fearing someone would get hurt down there – the floor isn’t completely level so not all of the tiles lie flat). But we finally pieced together that she must have slipped on the floor while running toward the stairs and she hit her head against the door frame at the bottom of the stairway when she fell. Which wouldn’t normally have caused a gash like this, but Ron and I had removed the door down there last summer when we moved the girls’ bedroom stuff down and had decided to leave the door off. But we’d left the hinges attached to the door frame, and I never even thought about it since the main hinge parts are rounded, and they’re either up high or pretty low enough to the floor. But when we looked more closely today, there was a metal corner that did stick up and she maybe could have hit at the exact angle and speed to catch that corner. It’s the only thing we can think of that was in the area where Becca says she fell.

The hinge has now been removed.

Six stitches, and one red popsicle later, we were on our way back home, with a very shaken but brave little 5-year-old. Who recuperated in the recliner watching her favorite cartoons for the rest of the day. We’ll have to keep the wound clean and put bacterial ointment on it daily, but otherwise there’s not much else to do until her stitches come out in a week. She got a careful bath before bedtime to clean the blood and other assorted gunk out of her hair and so far has been sleeping well, with a dose of Motrin to help.

Thus ends our streak of having one child who had never had stitches! Each of the girls has now had one injury requiring them – Abby fell into the corner of a table a few months after she turned 2, and Hannah fell against a rocking chair in the church nursery just a week before her 3rd birthday. At least Becca made it a few years longer – but I’m kind of hoping that now that we’ve completed the trifecta (so to speak), that we’ll be completely done with ever needing stitches again.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see on that one. But this is certainly one snow day that we’ll never forget!

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